Moments after his record-setting run in the 100-metre final of the 1988 Olympics seized a global spotlight, sprinter Ben Johnson grabbed an oversized Canadian flag to wave before the world.

The gold was his.

And he was ours.

Canada — 25 years ago next week — was the world’s best in the glamour event of the Seoul Summer Games.

Just two days later, of course, Johnson sparked the first-ever global doping scandal after testing positive for steroids, leaving him stripped of his gold medal and world-record finish (9.79 seconds) while facing the scorn of a humiliated nation.

“Why, Ben, why?” was The Toronto Sun’s front-page headline as the scandal unfolded.

With next week marking a quarter-century since that dark moment, it’s time again to confront potentially uncomfortable questions relating to Johnson, doping in general and what it means to be Canadian:

Is sport, particularly track, any more clean now than in 1988?

Was Johnson the only athlete in that 100-metre final taking performance-enhancing drugs?

How is it Canadians have come to largely forgive (even embrace) Johnson, scandal and all?

And, perhaps most importantly, what did the euphoria around Johnson’s win — and the deeply-wounding humiliation around his disgrace — say about Canada?

“Canada is a small country,” says University of Texas-Austin professor John Hoberman, a doping historian who also studies the sport-nationalism link. “(You have a) small-country complex. You’re stuck next to the (U.S.) giant.

“So, the one thing you find about a lot of small countries is success in (athletics) is compensatory for the lack of other kinds of power.”

Johnson’s win was undoubtedly a validation of Canada’s global aspirations — to be noticed, to be admired, to be revered on the world stage. His fall underscored the nation’s inverse insecurities, the bordering-on-irrational fear that we don’t (and maybe can’t) measure up.

Those insecurities largely remain today, exposed whenever Canadians bask in a visiting celebrity’s praise or cheer a Canuck’s even-marginal international success. (They like us! They really like us!)

So, yes, the Johnson scandal — and the 600-page report produced by a royal commission, the Dubin inquiry — said a lot about him, athletic ethics and Canada’s national psyche.

But it has taken nearly 25 years for the scandal to fully evolve, for the dust to truly settle — and for Canadians to accept the reality of what happened.

Improbably, Johnson hasn’t just been forgiven. He’s actually now sort of embraced by Canadians — a recent standing ovation during a charity track meet at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium surprising even the former star himself.

Why is this?

How did the athlete whose mistakes blew the lid off Olympic doping and tore the scab off Canada’s wounded self-image go from hero to zero to sympathetic brother-in-arms?

While what Hoberman called “outrage fatigue” is a factor, the 2012 documentary 9.79* reframed the scandal (it aired internationally, an added bonus for Canadians).

The eye-popping film presented Johnson as a soft-spoken man, motivated to win gold for his mother and regretful of his decision.

It also reminded people — particularly Canadians — of the unlikeable Carl Lewis, who, it was revealed about a decade ago, tested positive for stimulants mere weeks before Seoul but was excused by U.S. officials.

(The Americans decided to do nothing in 1988 because it was an “inadvertent” positive. Imagine a homicide detective telling a murder suspect “Don’t worry, the guy probably deserved it,” for a fair comparison.)

The brash Lewis got the gold after Johnson was stripped. But he embodies the American asterisk, the thing many Canadians dislike about U.S. overachievers, and it’s a short trip to find track veterans who believe Lewis, too, was nobody’s hero. Perhaps the most astonishing part of 9.79* is the revelation one of Lewis’s cronies, Andre Jackson, was in the room when Johnson gave the post-race urine sample that tested positive — echoes of the Dubin-ditched theory that the Canadian was set up.

Johnson claims in the film that Jackson told him in the early 2000s he had spiked the Canadian’s drinks at several pre-Seoul events. The conspiracy theory takes on new meaning with Jackson’s odd statement to the filmmakers.

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” he said of spiking Johnson’s drink. “What has been carried out in 1988 cannot and will not be invalidated.”

The passage of time suggests that a controversy of this magnitude — “Ben Johnson was the first major doping scandal in modern history,” Hoberman says — may never be fully understood.

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Ben Johnson scandal 25 years later

Moments after his record-setting run in the 100-metre final of the 1988 Olympics seized a global spotlight, sprinter Ben Johnson grabbed an oversized Canadian flag to wave before the world.

The gold was his.

And he was ours.

Canada — 25 years ago next week — was the world’s best in the glamour event of the Seoul Summer Games.

Just two days later, of course, Johnson sparked the first-ever global doping scandal after testing positive for steroids, leaving him stripped of his gold medal and world-record finish (9.79 seconds) while facing the scorn of a humiliated nation.

“Why, Ben, why?” was The Toronto Sun’s front-page headline as the scandal unfolded.

With next week marking a quarter-century since that dark moment, it’s time again to confront potentially uncomfortable questions relating to Johnson, doping in general and what it means to be Canadian: